Invertebrate left... but with a nice bum!

New! Free! Mini! Generous! Essential! Surprising! These and other adjectives surround the young female bum portrayed in the image above, but they are not referring to it, no no, do not fall into the trap! The trick is bold and refined, it uses the noble art of rhetorical allegory to alert the reader that the referent is not in the foreground but in the pocket, not on the surface of immediate, uncouth mental connections but in the depth of the audacious association between sensuous femininity and ... an old, communist newspaper. The epithets, indeed, are referring to "L'Unità" (see the pocket), the journal founded by Antonio Gramsci in 1924 and, from then onwards, official mouthpiece of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and, after its end, of its inheritors.

In its incomparable synthesis, the Unità-bum tells us of two major historical defeats: 1) the defeat of the feminist movement (unable to become 'senso-comune') reduced to a bum, as if there was the need to sell even the ex-communist newspaper by means of women's bodies (is there anybody in Italy who does not use boobs and bums to sell a commodity?) 2) and the defeat of the left, swept away from the parliament and, more importantly and despairingly, from the streets and the civil society.

In his article (here), Anderson claims that the snobbish intellectual posturing of the PCI apparatus and intelligentsia towards popular culture, increasingly saturated "with a tidal wave of the crassest idiocies and fantasies" diffused by Berlusconi's mediatic counter-revolution, had been one of the reasons for the left's progressive defeats ... Is the Unità retreating to Berlusconi's bum-marketing style in order to obtain the lost connection? Well, if this is the opinion l'Unità has of popular culture and if Berlusconi's consent is 'threatened' using the same schlock-lobomotising tools, we cannot really hope for a change anytime soon...